DBO - 2nd week

This week, we read some quotes from experienced teachers in reading

classes; we talked about the ideas that appeal to us and we also mentioned
about the importance of stages in reading: pre- reading, while-reading, post-
reading. Pre-reading is important to get students to the text, to get their
attention, to raise their interest, to motivate them, to prepare them for reading,
to get the gist and the general-main idea. To improve reading comprehension,
students should be encouraged to complete pre-reading activities before reading
text. Familiarity with the text improves understanding and leads to reading
success. Some pre-reading activities are discussing the topic and brainstorming.
While-reading is important for checking students’ comprehension. The purpose
for reading determines the appropriate type and level of comprehension. We can
check their comprehension by asking them to tell in their own words what they
have understood, asking some questions about the text, rearranging paragraphs
or sentences of the text for students to put back in the correct order. Finally, we
should always follow up our reading activities with a post-reading activity, which
will give students the opportunity to practice their reading and to feel they have
achieved something. Some post-reading activities are filling in the gaps,
matching pictures to paragraphs, role plays and group works. The most important
thing we shouldn’t forget is to make sure students understand what the purpose
for reading is. We should explain the activity at first and let them know what we
will do. That’s to say, we should BE CLEAR! Other experiences or ideas of the
teachers that appeal to us are these: using authentic materials, getting learners
to guess words that they don’t know, if they can’t manage that, helping them to
find out the meaning by asking leading questions, checking their pronunciation
by asking them to read aloud (but not always) and setting a library in the class
containing such as magazines, articles etc.

Another thing we mentioned in this lesson is that if we are not on the same
page with our learners, it doesn’t make any sense. If we do not respect them,
they don’t take any risk. If they don’t take any risk, they keep their mouth shut.
We also should know that teachers’ attitude and classroom atmosphere affect
the learning process.

We also talked about the models for teaching reading. These models are:
1. The Bottom-up Model (going to general from the words) 2. The Top-down
Model (taking general idea, going over phrases, words) 3. The Interactive Model

Finally, we talked about reading techniques and their purposes and

matched the techniques with reading activities. 1. Skimming (reading a text
quickly to find the main ideas) 2. Scanning (reading a text quickly to find specific
information) 3. Contextual guessing (guessing the meaning of words in a text) 4.
Cloze exercise (fill-in-the-blank exercise) 5. Outlining (note-taking technique for
helping the reader to see the main points of a text) 6. Paraphrasing (expressing
ideas in other words) 7. Scrambled stories (reordering the mixed up pieces of a
text) 8. Information transfer (transferring information from the text into another
form of related text) 9. Making inferences (understanding what is meant in a text)
10. Intensive reading (reading carefully for complete comprehension) 11.
Extensive reading (reading widely to improve comprehension) 12. Passage
completion (finishing a reading passage)

Munise ÖZTÜRK